CDF Project 1 — Ineffective & Effective Design

Effective Design

This is a screen in the KungFu Tea mobile application, intended to display the drink menu for customers that downloaded the app. It is located in the “Drinks” option in the hamburger menu. The goal of the design was to display all the different drink options, which I think it did well. The colorful text boxes are eye-catching and the images of the drinks convey much more meaning to a customer than just the drink name text. It communicates a message of a variety of vibrant drinks that are pleasant to drink. The colorful display conveys the diversity of drinks, and the line-by-line layout resembles a menu that’s easy to read. The font is also sort of spaced-out and rounded-out, communicating a feeling of calmness. These components work well together, although all of the colors could be distracting.

Ineffective design

This is a website that allows people to edit PDF documents. The major problem with this design is the green double arrow button in the left-aligned vertical menu. This button is intended to allow users to save their edits into a new PDF document. This is a very important button, because the user will not continue to use the website if they cannot figure out how to download/save their changes.However, the design does not help because the double down-facing arrows do not reflect a “download” action. Instead, the double arrows communicate the action of expanding a drop-down menu. In addition, the fact that it is situated underneath the “save” button communicates the idea that it is not related to a save function. The green color would work well if the design was instead a down-facing single arrow with a tail (like ->).